News: Success Stories

Faculty Exchange Program: “An Excellent Opportunity to Strengthen Collaborations”

Mónica Cameirão, a postdoctoral researcher at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI), spent four months at Carnegie Mellon University (between August and December 2013), more specifically at the Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT), as part of the Faculty Exchange Program of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.

According to Mónica Cameirão, “participating in the CMU Portugal Faculty Exchange Program was a very enriching experience.” While in Pittsburgh, where CMU is located, the researcher had the opportunity “to learn new contents, structure and teaching methodologies of specific courses at CMU,” and to “collaborate in research activities with Dan Siewiorek and his team in the domain of interactive technologies for stroke rehabilitation at the QoLT,” she stated. In her opinion, “both goals have been fully accomplished and exceeded the initial expectations.”

With interests in Machine Learning and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Mónica Cameirão used her stay at CMU to learn more about those areas, and attended two courses taught by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute that she had previously identified as being relevant for her teaching and research. The first course, “Applied Machine Learning”, was taught by Carolyn P. Rose, professor at CMU. According to the Portuguese professor, “this is an important course that exploits various data mining approaches by applying different machine learning algorithms to a variety of situations, both to understand and/or predict patterns,” adding that “because of its characteristics and general applicability, the content of this course has a practical value for several research topics at my home institution.” She will use what she learned in her “own research for making predictions concerning recovery after stroke based on demographic characteristics.” The second course she attended was “Human-Computer Interaction Process and Theory”, taught by Jen Mankoff, professor at CMU, a course for Ph. D. students enrolled in the HCI program that covers a number of topics for developing research and teaching skills.

Another goal of her four-month stay at CMU was to collaborate in research activities with Dan Siewiorek and Asim Smailagic at QoLT, which led to her involvement in an existing CMU project called QoLT Virtual Coach for Stroke Rehabilitation. Within this project, the CMU researchers are developing a computer mediated intelligent system for encouraging, guiding and monitoring upper limb exercises prescribed to stroke survivors that require ongoing rehabilitation. The current prototype integrates movement tracking, dialogue and emotion recognition to evaluate the physical and emotional state of its users, and adjusts the training sessions accordingly. In this project, “because of my background and experience, my main tasks were related to the evaluation of the Virtual Coach with end users, i.e., stroke survivors,” the Portuguese expert clarified. In addition to these research activities, Mónica Cameirão was also involved in the preparation of two collaborative research proposals involving QoLT and M-ITI for two calls in the context of the CMU Portugal program, namely the Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives and the Early Bird Projects calls.

Mónica Cameirão using the Virtual Coach at CMU. These coaches aim to reduce the barriers of current modes of service and support delivery, assuring safety. http://www.cmu.edu/qolt/Research/QoLTSystems/virtualcoach.html

When asked how she will apply what she learned at CMU in her work in Portugal, Mónica Cameirão stated that she will definitely incorporate some of the learned content in the courses she will be teaching in the near future, as well as put into practice specific teaching methodologies observed while at CMU. “Spending four months at CMU was a very exciting experience that gave me the opportunity to learn different teaching and research methodologies that allowed me to grow as a researcher and teacher,” she explains. Moreover, it “was an excellent opportunity to strengthen the collaboration with the Quality of Life Technology Center that will result in joint research activities in the near future,” she concluded.

A postdoctoral researcher with a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies and Audiovisual Media, Mónica Cameirão worked in previous years as research assistant at the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, in Zürich, Switzerland.

February 2014

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For more information about the Faculty Exchange Program visit https://cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=1970 .

João Mota Uses Distributed Algorithms to Solve Optimization Problems

The study of distributed algorithms to solve optimization problems took João Mota on a journey that he finished in October 2013, when he successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on “Communication-Efficient Algorithms For Distributed Optimization.”

For five years, João Mota was a dual degree doctoral student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST/UL) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. João Mota was advised by João Xavier and Pedro Aguiar, from IST/UL, and Markus Püschel, from CMU.

In his dissertation, João Mota developed “a classification scheme for distributed optimization problems,” and “a set of algorithms for distributed optimization.” In looking back, João Mota feels that these positive results reflect the important role his advisors played, not only on guiding his research, but also on teaching him “technical knowledge, how to think and to do research, and how to expose findings to an audience.”

During his studies, João Mota followed a mantra that he felt could be good for prospective students: “Do the type of research that you like and do what inspires you.”

CMU Portugal: Can you give us an overview of the main findings of your dissertation?

João Mota (JM): My dissertation is about solving optimization problems in scenarios where the problem data, rather than being known at one location, is distributed over several nodes of a network. That is, it is about distributed optimization. For example, suppose you have a database that is spread over several computers; this might happen because the database is too large to fit into the memory of a single computer, or because the data was generated in different locations, for instance, in different companies or hospitals. If you want to do some complex operation on that data, like extracting high-level information from it without transmitting all the databases to a single location or computer, then you have to use distributed algorithms. In this dissertation, we studied distributed algorithms that solve optimization problems. There are many problems that can be formulated as optimization problems, many of which arise naturally in distributed scenarios.

CMU Portugal: What is the impact of these findings?

JM: This dissertation has two main contributions. The first is a classification scheme for distributed optimization problems. This scheme not only allows a systematic approach to solve generic distributed optimization problems, but also allows the organization of most of the prior work in the field. In other words, it gives a big picture, which was missing before. The second and most important contribution is a set of algorithms for distributed optimization. These algorithms solve very general classes of problems, but exhibit an excellent performance; they solve problems using less communication between the nodes than prior distributed algorithms. Solving a problem with less communication is important, because communication between nodes (that is, computers or sensors) is usually the slowest operation, or the operation that consumes the most energy. Therefore, the algorithms proposed in this dissertation can make, for example, a sensor network operate longer, because the nodes do not consume as much energy as with other algorithms. Surprisingly, we have found that our algorithms, which solve very general classes of problems, often perform better than the best algorithms designed for very specific problems.

CMU Portugal: How do you position your research?

JM: My research is mostly theoretical, but has some practical implications. Actually, this is the case of all research on algorithms, since these can be theoretically challenging, but also have an immediate practical impact on a given field. I would say that my research lies at the intersection of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics.

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“The algorithms proposed in this dissertation can make, for example, a sensor network operate longer, because the nodes do not consume as much energy as with other algorithms.” – João Mota

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CMU Portugal: A dual degree Ph.D. involves a lot of work and study. In looking back to these five years, which were the most difficult periods and the key learning experiences?

JM: Yes, that is true. But I think that no Ph.D. is a simple job. In my case, with a dual degree, I had to move twice between two continents, each time for a period of two years. This is not easy, since a Ph.D. student always has deadlines and each move involves a considerable amount of time-consuming bureaucracy. Fortunately, the people involved in the program were very supportive and helped a lot with this. Also, the first and second years of the Ph.D. were quite difficult, because that is the time to take courses and pass the qualifiers, while starting research. The problem is that starting research involves finding an important problem that has not been solved before, and this requires knowing the field of research very well. I think most of my key learning experiences involved my advisors. Although I did not really notice it on a daily basis, looking back, I learned a lot from them: not only technical knowledge, but also how to think and to do research, and how to expose our findings to an audience.

CMU Portugal: How was it to work with three advisors, from different countries?

JM: I had three advisors, two in Portugal and one in the U.S., and all of them worked in different areas. In spite of this, our interaction turned out to work very well. I ended up working more in the area of one of the advisors, but the other two always contributed with complementary knowledge and interaction. Almost all of our meetings were with everyone. Of course, it is always hard to find a common meeting time between four people. Also, videoconference meetings are hard, because you cannot really write equations during the meeting. However, this forced me to be more organized and, before every meeting, I prepared a small document with everything that I wanted to discuss. This actually helped my research a lot, because it forced me to focus on the essential ideas and to organize them better.

CMU Portugal: At the beginning of your degree you said that your main goals were “to develop my skills as a researcher, but also to contribute to solving difficult problems arising in ECE.” Did you achieve your goals?

JM: I think they were partially achieved. During the Ph.D., I developed some skills, but I also realized that there are many more to develop, and many things to learn. I solved some interesting problems, but I also found many more to be solved. Overall, I am happy with the outcome of the Ph.D. and with the research that I have done.

CMU Portugal: You already have a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London. What are your expectations for this position?

JM: I am very excited with this new step in my career and in my life. Initially, I will be working on problems similar to the ones I addressed in my dissertation, but from a slightly different perspective. After a while, I expect to change my research area and bring my knowledge in distributed optimization to other fields. I am also excited to be in London.

CMU Portugal: What would you highlight from your experience to inspire a prospective student?

JM: I don’t know if this is very inspirational, but what I would say to a prospective student is that although a Ph.D. is hard work, you generally do what you like and you have some independence (although, of course, this depends on your advisors). Also, you get to interact with many people, both in your university and at conferences. And a piece of advice: do the type of research that you like and do what inspires you; most advisors are flexible on that, and you can negotiate with them what you want to do.

December, 2013

Student Investigates Telecommunication Industries in Adverse Economic Environments

A recent report of the World Bank highlights that the access to mobile phone devices in África is more common than running water, banking services or even electricity. In some of the Portuguese speaking countries, the numbers are massive: in Cape Verde four out of five citizens already own a mobile phone; and in Angola the number of active SIM cards tripled from 5.2 million in 2007 to 14.2 million registered at the end of 2012.

This report entitled The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa (eTransform Africa 2012), was prepared jointly by the World Bank and the African Development Bank in cooperation with the Africa Union. “This report is not directly related to my work but in my first paper, I mention the industries that were empowered from mobile communications in Africa,” said Mohammad Jahanbakht, a dual degree doctoral student in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship, at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa, Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Mohammad Jahanbakht defined the study of the African Mobile Industry as the starting point of his research. “What makes this research very exciting is the fact that these industries usually require investments from Multinational Corporations in the host country,” but “in the adverse business environments of dysfunctional economies (such as most sub Saharan Africa), these multinationals hold their entry until the business conditions get improved,” he explained. Furthermore, “we see the presence of several private corporations that were started and managed by the African entrepreneurs that compete with the funded multinational corporations.” One of the examples is “Celtel, founded by Mo Ibrahim, that quickly spanned from its first operation in Uganda in 1995 to 13 African countries by 2005 and was sold for 3.4 billion dollars.” Mohammad Jahanbakht explains: “The heart of my research seeks to offer an explanation for a mechanism for such industry development.”

Since 2009/2010, when he began his doctoral studies, Mohammad Jahanbakht has been working with “Human Capital, Knowledge Based Firms, and the Entrepreneurial Life-Cycle,” a research project carried out in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a CIência e a Tecnologia. In the summer of 2012, Mohammad Jahanbakht did an internship at the World Bank, focusing “mainly on high growth entrepreneurship in Africa,” in line with his Ph.D. research. This experience gave him access to a part of the data that he is using for his main paper.

One year from completing his dual doctoral degree, at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST/UL), Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, and Carnegie Mellon University, Mohammad Jahanbakht sees himself going into both academic or non-academic careers, but favors “a post-doc which eventually leads to an academic position.”

CMU Portugal: You defended your dissertation proposal earlier this year, on the topic “The Role Of Entrepreneurship In The African Mobile Industry Growth.” What were your main findings so far?

Mohammad Jahanbakht (MJ): My thesis aims to shed light on the mechanisms behind the growth of capital and knowledge intensive industries in dysfunctional economies, in the context of mobile telecommunication industries across Africa. Several countries in Africa have always had an unfavorable environment for economic development; during the latter half of the 20th century, many countries, like Zimbabwe, Burundi, Rwanda and Cameroon, had several years of negative GDP growth, poor institutions and insufficient infrastructure. Many were ranked at the top of the corruption index, and some even faced frequent political turmoil. Yet, despite such adverse conditions, the mobile telecommunication industry has experienced an unexpected phenomenal growth.

CMU Portugal: What is the aim of your research?

MJ: These dysfunctional economies usually suffer from weak infrastructure. Our data is on the mobile operating industry in Africa. What makes this research very exciting is the fact that these industries usually require an investment from Multinational Corporations in the host country (in this case Sub Saharan Africa). This investment would bring the initial capital and knowhow, and subsequent transfer of knowhow through local firms might occur. However, in the adverse business environment of dysfunctional economies (such as most Sub-Saharan Africa), these multinationals hold their entry until the business conditions described above are improved. The question that then comes to mind is which firms enter African countries, such as Malawi, Rwanda, etc., and develop those markets? My research aims to explain a mechanism for such industry development.

CMU Portugal: Why have you decided to take the African mobile industry as a case study?

MJ: The initial inspiration came in 2009, when I was a first year Ph.D. student. I read an article about Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born entrepreneur and the lead founder of Celtel, a pan-African mobile operator, in 1995. Mr. Ibrahim sold Celtel in 2005 for 3.6 billion dollars. The interesting point was that Celtel was not backed by the government nor a major multinational operator like Vodafone, France Telecom or Portugal Telecom, but it was able to reach an astonishing success in a short time and in an extremely adverse business environment.

CMU Portugal: What has it been like being able to work with two different advisors, from two different countries?

MJ: This has been a very rich experience. My main advisor is Professor Francisco Veloso, who is currently the dean of Católica Lisbon School for Business and Economics. My co-advisors are Professor David Hounshell, at Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor Romel Mostafa, at Ivey Business School, in Canada. I also have Professors Miguel Amaral and Rui Baptista in my committee. I work closely with one of my advisors and coordinate the progress of the research with the others. I have stayed about six months in Canada, about two years at Carnegie Mellon, and about two years in Lisbon.

CMU Portugal: How important was the opportunity to do an internship during your doctoral studies?

MJ: I had the opportunity to work in the World Bank in the summer of 2012, with the kind support of my main advisor. I worked with Dr. Iacovone at the Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship (ITE) group, within the Financial and Private Sector Development network. My work there was mainly on high growth entrepreneurship in Africa, very much in line with my Ph.D. research. I was also able to access a part of the data that I am using for my main paper.

December 2013

 

Supporting Technology Commercialization in International Partnerships was the theme of the Working Session organized by UTEN Portugal and the CMU Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, held on October 29, 2013, in conjunction with the XV Latin Ibero-American Conference on Management of Technology (ALTEC), in Porto, Portugal. Tara Branstad, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC), and Jorge Figueira, director of the Technology Transfer Office of the Universidade de Coimbra, shared their perceptions and experiences in managing Intellectual Property in international contexts.

José Manuel Mendonça, the scientific director of UTEN Portugal, was very pleased by the choice of topic, which, he strongly believes, “is fully aligned with UTEN Portugal and ALTEC.” João Claro, national director of the CMU Portugal Program, welcomed the speakers and the participants, and also expressed his satisfaction with the organization of the session, due to the fact that “with the globalization of Science, international partnerships for Research, Development, and Innovation have become increasingly common, presenting new and significant challenges to the management of Intellectual Property (IP).”

Tara Branstad’s presentation focused on inter-institutional partnerships and joint patenting, and how they may benefit from inter-institutional agreements (IIAs), to leverage areas of expertise and resources across different institutions. In her opinion, it is important “to have inter-institutional agreements when multiple parties hold rights to an invention,” adding that “only through mutual agreement, rights can be transferred exclusively for commercial development, and IIAs allow this to happen.”

About joint patenting, Tara Branstad considers that “the biggest challenge is aligning the interests of the involved parties.” For example, “in dealing with joint IP between universities and industry, it is important for the university to ensure its rights to continue its research efforts unencumbered,” she explained. On the other hand, “in managing joint IP between universities, it is important that the universities communicate with each other early and develop a coherent patent and commercialization strategy, where one of the institutions serves as the lead party.” The presentation concluded with a note on how the joint program with multiple Portuguese universities and CMU is unique in the CMU system. For this reason, she feels that it might be beneficial to consider “creating a template or a master IIA.”

The strong collaboration between CTTEC and the Portuguese Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), led CMU to hire Sofia Vairinho, a member of the TTO of the Universidade do Algarve. Since January 2013, Sofia Vairinho has been living and working in Pittsburgh, as part of CTTEC. Tara Branstad explained that “as research becomes increasingly international and collaborative, we have found it helpful to have Sofia’s expertise in international IP law, and her knowledge of different cultures and languages; however, her biggest contribution is her commitment to work, and her creativity and desire to learn.”

Jorge Figueira spoke about knowledge transfer at the Universidade de Coimbra (UC), and his experience in managing IP co-ownership with universities in Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Spain, among other countries. Jorge Figueira reinforced the message, also expressed by Tara Branstad, that co-ownership is “an opportunity to connect and learn from other TTOs, a potential open door for other markets and contacts, and an important open innovation indicator.” Two additional aspects that are important for establishing an IIA agreement with other universities were acknowledged by Jorge Figueira: the importance of “understanding the legal, cultural, and decision making differences” between countries; and the advantages of “openly, trying to assess which institution is in a better position to lead the commercialization efforts.”

In the past ten years, Jorge Figueira was pleased to say, the Universidade de Coimbra was able to “improve its Invention Disclosure Form, to create a process to manage all active IP agreement collaborations, to improve its screening process with a very objective and factual procedure, and to establish contacts with different technological brokers.”

Through its international experience, the TTO also “learned that there are some countries in which the decision making process can halt the IP valorization efforts, and got a deeper knowledge about when to drop out.” All this work has strengthened both technology pull and technology push efforts within the knowledge transfer activities of the Universidade de Coimbra. Jorge Figueira closed his presentation by challenging Portuguese TTO – “Can we only do this with foreign universities?” – and encouraging them to “start a deeper collaboration between Portuguese TTOs that have co-owned IP.”

The two presentations were followed by a moment of discussion with the participants. One of the salient points of the discussion was that “universities need to have a strategy for technology transfer for TTOs to succeed.”

João Claro presented the new Entrepreneurship-in-Residence initiative for early stage startups that the CMU Portugal Program is outlining. The initiative began as a pilot program in 2012, and it seeks to support very early stage entrepreneurial teams through an immersion in CMU’s dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem, with the support of Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystems. The initiative will assist in addressing the “human and social capital gaps” that are often found in “early stage high-tech new ventures, in particular academic spin-offs, led by less experienced entrepreneurs.” During the immersion period, the entrepreneurial team will follow three inter-connected streams of work: networking and business development, internship with an accelerator; and a training program.

João Claro explained that one of the key goals for the initiative is to help the entrepreneurial teams develop managerial competences that are specific and critical to early-stage high-tech ventures. Some of the details regarding selection process, progress evaluation, and funding, are still under discussion, but the national director of the CMU Portugal Program believes that it will be possible to launch this initiative in the first semester of 2014.

November 2013

Luis Brandão Presents Paper at Asiacrypt 2013

Luís Brandão, dual degree Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), recently presented the paper “Secure Two-Party Computation with Reusable Bit-Commitments, via a Cut-and-Choose with Forge-and-Lose Technique” at Asiacrypt 2013, the 19th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, held in India, on December 1 to 5, 2013.

Asiacrypt is one of the three flagship annual conferences in cryptology promoted by the International Association for Cryptology Research. “Having a paper accepted here promotes a good visibility of the results to other researchers in the area,” stated Luís Brandão,” adding that “it is also a personal milestone in my Ph.D. path, representing a validation of research that I’ve been doing over the past two years.” The paper “deals with the problem of ‘secure two-party computation,’ where two distrustful parties decide to compute a function of their combined input, but without revealing the input to one another,” explained the Ph.D. candidate. This paper describes a new protocol “with significant improvements in efficiency and applicability, within a particular state-of-the-art approach of solving the problem,” he stressed, adding that “the protocol is secure even if any of the parties is ‘malicious’.”

The ability to achieve efficient “secure computation” – the focus of Luís Brandão´s research – could become increasingly useful in society, “allowing entities to have a fine-grained control of the information that they leak when making interactions that depend on sensitive data, while at the same time reducing or avoiding the need to place trust in (corruptible or expensive) third parties” the student explained. “’Secure computation’ can be seen as a (cryptographic) tool with the potential to resolve some conflicts between privacy and utility of sharing information,” he added, “even though at first sight this possibility may seem paradoxical or counter-intuitive.” For example, “two hospitals could jointly compute some statistic about their combined private databases, in order to learn something that may be helpful for medical decisions, without having to share the databases between themselves or anyone else.”

Luís Brandão feels that the recent results will be useful for further research carried out by the community. For his future research, he expects to achieve follow-up results in this area and to have the opportunity to collaborate with cryptographers from around the world.

Passionate by cryptography, Luís Brandão is enrolled at the Faculdade de Ciências of the Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL) and at Carnegie Mellon University, in the scope of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

December 2013

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The paper is available online here (extended abstract) and here (full version).

CMU Portugal Program Startup Sentilant Takes Its First Steps

Sentilant, a spinoff from the Universidade de Coimbra, created in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, was co-founded in May 2013 by Bruno Cabral and Jorge Granjal, faculty members of the Universidade de Coimbra. The company is currently headquartered at Instituto Pedro Nunes, in Coimbra. Bruno Cabral, who has had a deep involvement with the Program, in particular as co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of the research project Æminium – Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality, feels that “the know-how and technology developed with Æminium were essential to plan, design and develop Sentilant’s infrastructure.”

The learning, inspiration and networking opportunities provided by the CMU Portugal Program were the most beneficial factors for Bruno Cabral while he was creating Sentilant. He was also a faculty member in the joint Professional Masters Program in Software Engineering (MSE) between CMU and the Universidade de Coimbra, and a participant in the Faculty Exchange Program. “Throughout the Program, I have had the opportunity to observe, interact and be inspired by the many entrepreneurial initiatives that were being created by the people participating in the Program,” says Bruno Cabral, adding that “networking with the other startups of the Program, and sharing their experience, made this process much simpler.”

The Æminium project aimed at improving the state-of-art in concurrent programming, making it simpler, safer and more efficient. One of the project’s outcomes was EVE, a new event-oriented programming language that “offers implicit parallelization on the event-loop, making it an ideal programming language for developing web-based systems, such as Sentilant’s multi-tenant framework,” explained Bruno Cabral. “The know-how and technology developed with Æminium was essential to plan, design and develop Sentilant’s infrastructure,” he added.

Sentilant provides services and software products that allow people and organizations to collect, analyze and share business and real-time sentient data from, and on, their mobile devices. The market will see the first version of their product next year. So far, Sentilant has won two technological innovation awards with a product that uses sensorial data collected from smartphones to help users improve driving efficiency: the Inov C Award (first place) of the Competition “Arrisca.C’2012 – Ideas, Business Plans, and Proofs of Concept”, and the second place in the PT Galp Innovation Challenge.

For the near future, the founders plan to make the first version of their product available in mobile app stores during the first quarter of 2014. Afterwards, Bruno Cabral and Jorge Granjal plan to deploy the first customized version for organizational clients. Also next year, Sentilant will “start establishing its client base and develop a stable version of the company’s development and production framework,” revealed Bruno Cabral.

December 2013
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The Æminium project aimed at improving the state-of-art in concurrent programming, making it simpler, safer and more efficient. It was carried out between 2009 and 2012 in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. The project’s main goal was to develop a framework and programming language that offer developers and users a new paradigm where concurrency is the default, which is contrary to the common practice where sequential execution is the standard. The Principal Investigators of this project were Bruno Cabral, from the Universidad de Coimbra, and Jonathan Aldrich, from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering has named Jelena Kovačević to head its Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), effective April 1, 2014. Jelena Kovačević will succeed Ed Schlesinger, who is leaving CMU to become dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. ECE Professor Larry Pileggi will serve as interim department head until Kovačević assumes the post this spring.

“I am extremely pleased that Jelena will join the college leadership as the new department head of ECE. Her exceptional scholarly reputation, demonstrated commitment to her colleagues and students, her boundless energy and enthusiasm and collegial nature make her an excellent choice for the position,” said James H. Garrett, Jr., dean of the College of Engineering and the Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at CMU.

Kovačević, a professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at CMU, is a passionate educator whose research involves bioimaging and multi-resolution techniques such as wavelets and frames.

“I am extremely excited about this opportunity. ECE is thriving by all measures of success and I will work together with all the ECE community to push ECE even further toward becoming the creative driving force in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT), CMU and the world for its scholarly and entrepreneurial quality in terms of research, education and societal impact,” said Kovačević, who came to CMU in 2003.

An innovative researcher and educator, Kovačević is a fellow of the IEEE and has served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and associate editor, guest editor and editorial board member of numerous publications and special issues. She has been involved in organizing a number of international conferences and meetings, and she was a regular member of the NIH EBIT Study section. She has given numerous plenary and keynote presentations at international conferences and meetings.

A prolific writer, she has co-authored the textbooks “Wavelets and Subband Coding,” “Foundations of Signal Processing” and the upcoming “Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing.” She co-authored a top-10 cited paper in the Journal of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, and a top-100 downloaded paper on the IEEE Xplore. She received the Belgrade October Prize in 1986, the E.J. Jury Award at Columbia University in 1991 and the 2010 CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award at CMU. She also is a fellow of EUSIPCO.

She has been actively involved in the campus community, serving as the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Affairs Committee Chair for the past 10 years, and more recently as chair of CIT’s Enhanced Quality Education Committee.

Kovačević received her undergraduate engineering degrees from the University of Belgrade and her master’s degree and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1988 and 1991, respectively. From 1991 to 2002, she was with Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. She was co-founder and technical vice president of xWaveforms and an adjunct professor at Columbia.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University ,December 2013

Jelena Kovačević (pictured above) is a professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at CMU. She succeeds Ed Schlesinger, who has been named dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Jelena Kovačević is involved in the CMU Portugal Program, by being co-advisor of the dual degree Ph.D. student in ECE, Filipe Condessa.

 

Carnegie Mellon University’s José M.F. Moura has been awarded the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professorship of Engineering in recognition of his leadership and research contributions in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.

“I am honored for receiving this chair. I have known Philip and Marsha Dowd for several years now. This chair is one of several examples of their dedication to CMU. It encourages me to continue my efforts in global education and working with my students in pursuit of excellence,” said Moura, director of the Carnegie Mellon/Portugal program and a University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

Moura’s research has focused on several areas, including biomedical MRI and detectors to recover bits recorded in high-density computer disks, or video compression. His research group has developed technology that has been licensed by several companies. His recent work in data science aims to extract knowledge from large amounts of unstructured data, a task similar to looking for a needle in a haystack or predicting which users among millions of a particular service will drop the service in a given month.

“Marsha and I view people like Jose as superheroes. He is quiet and mild-mannered, and yet he is changing the face of higher education in Portugal,” said Philip Dowd, a CMU trustee. Philip Dowd, a former senior executive with SunGard Data Systems, holds an engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from the University of Chicago. His wife, Marsha, received a master’s degree in liberal arts from DePaul University.

The Dowds are very active at CMU. In addition to the engineering professorship, the Dowds established the Philip and Marsha Dowd Teaching Fellowship and the Philip and Marsha Dowd Engineering Seed Fund in the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES). “We are extremely honored and grateful to have such outstanding support from the Dowds as we continue to make our College of Engineering ever more innovative, entrepreneurial, global, impactful and recognized for academic excellence and world-class faculty and students,” said James H. Garrett, Jr., dean of CMU’s College of Engineering and the Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Moura is an IEEE fellow, an AAAS fellow and a corresponding member of the Academia das Cie’ncias of Portugal, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a recipient of the 2000 IEEE Third Millennium Medal for outstanding achievements and contributions, the 2003 IEEE Signal Processing Meritorious Service Award, the 2006 IBM Faculty Award, the 2007 CIT Outstanding Research Award and the 2008 Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award for Contributions to Engineering Education.

In 2008-2009, Moura was president of the 15,000-member IEEE Signal Processing Society. He received the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award for fundamental contributions to statistical signal processing, and the 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society Award for outstanding technical contributions and leadership in signal processing.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

December 2013

O rientation Day in Portugal Strengthens Collaborative Network
On October 19, 2013, the CMU Portugal Program welcomed its new dual degree doctoral students at the Annual Student Orientation Day, which was held in Porto, Portugal. This informal networking event involved students, alumni, faculty and entrepreneurs in Portugal at the time, and had a strong focus on the global graduate education experience provided to the dual degree students. “You have a truly inter-national education, and this is not the same as an education abroad; you are doing joint research between two countries, which is a very valuable and unique opportunity for you to develop and position yourselves for international careers,” said João Claro, the national director of the Program.

The Orientation Day started with a welcome reception in a “barco rabelo”, the typical boat of the Douro River. During a short cruise in the river, João Claro talked to the students about their role in the Program: “You are our number one priority, our major concern.” On “Student Matters,” Sara Brandão, the executive director of the Program, presented topics related to formal procedures required for the period that the students stay with the Program. The students also had the opportunity to speak about their experiences and expectations, while enjoying the boat trip.

The group then moved to the facilities of INESC Porto, where the CMU Portugal Program organized an open session about the Google Glass initiative, and the rich and diverse experiences of the Program’s community members. The session started with an overview by João Claro about remarkable achievements by the Program’s students, researchers and entrepreneurs, and how the new students can become a part of this dynamics. One of the highlights of the overview was a startup launched in 2009 by three alumni of the Professional Master’s in Human Computer Interaction, jointly offered by the Universidade da Madeira and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Mambu, a provider of microfinance technology services, operates out of Berlin, Germany, and emerged from a capstone project carried out in the scope of the Professional Master’s Program. João Claro called the attention to this case, as it is evidence of “our capacity to transform an idea into a real product, and take it successfully to market at an international level, in a place as competitive as Berlin is nowadays.” Another aspect emphasized by João Claro was the strong collaboration between the Portuguese universities, CMU, and all the Program stakeholders, and how it can be leveraged by students as they acquire new knowledge and skills in the Program’s key focused areas of Information and Communication Technologies.

Since its creation, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), has welcomed more than 300 students in its multiple dual degree Professional Master’s and Doctoral programs, 200 of which currently are alumni. The career paths of the Program’s alumni are diverse. Alexandre Mateus and Rita Ferreira, for example, were the first dual degree doctoral students to graduate from the Program, in Engineering and Public Policy and Applied Mathematics, respectively. Alexandre Mateus has since been with the European Commission and Rita Ferreira has been a postdoc at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT/UNL). (Other profiles can be found here.)

João Claro also spoke about both new and existing opportunities for collaboration within the program, including the Faculty Exchange Program, Early Bird Projects, as well as the Entrepreneurship-in-Residence initiative. (Visit www.cmuportugal.org for specific information about each of these collaborative opportunities.)

The national director finished his presentation focusing on the opportunity that a dual degree Ph.D. program provides. “You are in a position to get the best education in the world in ICT, push the frontier of knowledge, work with top global companies, and contribute to the mission of placing Portugal in a leadership position in this area,“ he said. “But no one can replace each of you in figuring out how to make the most out of this opportunity,” concluded João Claro adding that “the Program and your advisors will help you throughout your studies, but ultimately it is up to you to make your own path.”

Google Glass and the value of a dual degree

The session proceeded with “CMU Portugal and Google Glass: How the Partnership Predicted an Unpredictable Event,” presented by João Paulo Costeira, researcher at the Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica (ISR) and faculty member at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL), and by Ricardo Cabral, a dual degree doctoral student at IST-UL and CMU. Ricardo Cabral made his presentation through videoconference due to the fact that he was in the United States at the time. The opportunity to receive one of the early Google Glass prototypes came out of a summer internship that Ricardo Cabral had at Google. His performance, and the relationships that he created, during the internship set him on the path to succeed in a very competitive, but rewarding process that ended with Google Glass in his hands, flying back to Portugal. “This was an amazing adventure,” said Ricardo Cabral adding that it “would not have been possible if it were not for the CMU Portugal Program.”

With these smart glasses in Portugal, a call for proposals to explore the Google Glass, launched by João Paulo Costeira in September, has already received more than 60 proposals from researchers from all over the country. The researcher is very enthusiastic. He considers that the glasses in the future can be used in many circumstances, and he gave healthcare as an example of an area that he sees as particularly promising. João Paulo Costeira finished his presentation saying: “The students are opening doors; they are further opening and empowering our universities.” For this researcher, who coordinates the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) dual degree doctoral program between IST-UL and CMU, the dual degree students are “ambassadors” of the Program, and they are “really bringing new ideas, concepts, and best practices to Portugal.”
Community building: a wealth of experiences

The session continued with a research pitch from a dual degree doctoral student in ECE, Saurabh Shintre, who is studying at the Faculdade de Engenharia of the Universidade do Porto (FEUP) and CMU. Saurabh Shintre has been enrolled in the Program since 2010/2011, carrying out research on private communication detection. In this period, he had the opportunity to intern at Cisco Systems, in the area of security and anonymity in wireless networks. He told the audience that his experience in the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program has meant “having the flexibility to choose the research focus that you want,” creating networks “with great researchers and staff members,” and benefiting from “support to help you overcome your challenges.”

The roundtable “CMU Portugal Community Building: Internships, Job Opportunities and Entrepreneurship Paths” brought together members of the Program’s community with different experiences, but a common deep involvement with the Program. Jerónimo Rodrigues, a dual degree doctoral student in ECE at IST-UL and CMU since 2008/2009, shared the diversity of experiences that he has already had. In the scope of his doctoral studies, he has done two internships, at the Qualcomm Innovation Center and at Google, and has worked on a project led by Honda. Jerónimo Rodrigues stressed the importance of being proactive, networking, and seeking to benefit of the learning opportunities provided through the seminars that CMU organizes, as was his case namely with the VASC Seminars at the Robotics Institute.

André Martins, after receiving his dual degree Ph.D. in Language Technologies in 2011/2012, returned to Priberam, the company where he had worked prior to starting the Ph.D. During his studies, André Martins also did an internship at Google, and back in Lisbon, developed the concept and launched the Priberam Machine Learning Seminars at IST-UL, and has been part of the organizing and steering committees of the Lisbon Machine Learning School, which had its third edition this year. “All of this was possible, because of the opportunities and the network that I was able to create during my studies as a dual degree doctoral student within the CMU Portugal Program,” said André Martins.

Inês Freitas de Oliveira, alumna of the dual degree Professional Master’s in Information Networking (MSIN), finished her studies in 2008, and gave a personal perspective of her experience. Inês Oliveira looks back at her time in the Program as a hard and challenging undertaking, but one that was very rewarding for her future. The program was very demanding, but allowed her to strengthen and develop new competences. The opportunity to be immersed in such an energetic environment at Carnegie Mellon, gave her the confidence to “never fear taking on new challenges.” PT Inovação funded the studies of Inês Oliveira, a career investment that has allowed her to move on to her current position in innovation management within the company.

The roundtable closed with the contribution of Susana Sargento, faculty member of the Universidade de Aveiro (UA) and researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), who recently became co-founder of a spin-off – Veniam’Works. Susana Sargento’s research on inter-vehicular communication, in particular as part of the CMU Portugal Program’s DRIVE-IN project, led to the creation of Veniam’Works in 2012. The researcher showed how her Ph.D. students have been collaborating in research projects and Veniam’Works, and stressed that they have been a “great help on scientific aspects, and have been able to use the collaboration for outstanding theses.”

The session ended with all the participants trying out the Google Glass with the help of João Martins, a master student at IST-UL, and member of João Paulo Costeira’s research team.

November 2013

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You can see the videos at P3 and Canal Superior.